Plaits

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Plaits is the spiritual successor of Mutable Instruments’ best-selling voltage-controlled sound source, Braids. Not just a mkII version: its hardware and software have been redesigned from scratch.

Just like its predecessor, it offers direct access to a large palette of easily tweakable raw sonic material, covering the whole gamut of synthesis techniques.Thanks to additional CV inputs, and to the use of three timbre-shaping parameters per model, Plaits is straightforward to use, and much closer to the ideal of one synthesis technique = one model. What were fragmented islands of sound in Braids are now part of a continuum of sounds.

Wavetable oscillator with four banks of 8x8 waves, with or without interpolation.

Chord generator, with divide down string/organ emulation or wavetables.A collection of speech synthesis algorithms (formant filter, SAM, LPC), with phoneme control and formant shifting. Several banks of phonemes or segments of words are available.

Plaits vs Braids?

Plaits shares no hardware or software with Braids!Floating-point DSP code written from scratch or inherited from Elements, Warps and Rings.Band-limited synthesis used almost everywhere, producing aliasing-free results at the base sample rate of 48kHz (Braids ran at 96kHz and used naive oversampling).High-quality Sigma-Delta ADC for CV acquisition, approaching a resolution of 16-bit (12-bit for Braids).ADC reads are interpolated in software to eliminate zipper noise.DC-coupled audio output, extending the range of the module to very low frequencies (Braids could not reach LFO ranges).Lean hardware design: less HP, mA and $!